A $5 Raspberry Pi Zero - A leap towards IIoT's Smart Dust horizon

Raspberry just hastened the advent of the Industrial Internet's "Smart Dust" horizon by releasing a multi-purpose computing device for $5!

Inexpensive hardware (sensors and edge computing) is supposed to be a key ingredient of the Industrial Internet.  One of the question that technologists and strategists have been trying to answer is where should the intelligence reside - because it costs.  This bring us to the struggle - how do we justify the cost of deploying zillions of nodes.  Can these sensors and nodes really justify the benefits?  Pi Zero may have just answered the question.  

We had speculated that IIoT will become the norm in the "Smart Dust" horizon, which is a state of technology maturity where the devices are miniature (small, very low power consumption, etc) and inexpensive (fire & forget strategy). Maybe the Smart Dust horizon got just hastened with the Pi Zero.

Over the last few years we have seen a radical decrease in cost of computing devices driven by standardized computing modules brought out in the market by vendors like Intel (Edison, Galileo) , Raspberry (Pi, Pi Zero), etc.  This has allowed evolution of the IIoT as the focus has shifted from designing the hardware to designing the solution where hardware becomes an off the shelf building block.   The focus of these devices has been on optimal functionality, support for mainstream software i.e. Linux & Windows, and low power consumption.

With Pi Zero, we are about to enter a new world where the IIoT computing device is just another lego, allowing the developers to cut their product and MVP cycles by significant amounts.  The cost to realize most use cases for IIoT has just been drastically reduced.  It is creating a new paradigm, which I like to call "System on board", no more taking the reference boards and then stripping them to make your own products.  Possibly when we look back, Pi Zero could be a big step in the direction of the next industrial revolution to be ushered by the IIoT.

About the author:
Bharat Kapoor:  I am a management consultant at A.T. Kearney, focusing on Industrial Internet and the Internet of Things. I conduct "Predicting the Future through the Industrial Internet Lens" workshops to help encourage the dialog on how Industrial Internet will impact our world—commerce, business models, social and cultural interactions. Be a part of the discussions on IIoT—join the LinkedIn group“Industrial Internet / Internet of Things - A Lens to Predicting the Future.”